A FAREWELL TO SOUTH AFRICA

By Alan Cowell; Alan Cowell, who had reported from Johannesburg since 1983, will become chief of The Times's bureau in Athens next month.

Published: January 25, 1987

THE NEWSPAPER BILLBOARD I sighted on my last drive to Johannesburg's Jan Smuts Airport bore the message ''Evicted U.S. Newsman Regarded as Hostile.'' I was, in fact, being expelled by a Government that no longer wished me to chronicle its country's internal struggle. But hostile? Had I been hostile to South Africa in my three years as chief of The Times's bureau in Johannesburg, then surely that last ride along the freeway would have been laden with relief. Instead, it was a journey shot through with sadness and questioning, as if some great epic had been torn from me midway in the reading, as if I had been robbed of the chance to grasp all its narrative strands - the harshness and the resilience of the characters, the myriad small tragedies, and the battle, on a grand scale, of a nation convulsed by an anguished history.

The eviction order came from a Government that has refused to publicly explain the action, either to me or my editors in New York, from a Government that has sought, through censorship and restrictions on reporters, to halt its own story in the telling, to place itself beyond accountability. The official piece of paper told me to leave not later than Jan. 10, and I did. But the visions of a land in turmoil will not be erased that simply.

But how to recount it all, in the wake of an enforced departure, after three years in South Africa and 10 in Africa as a whole, and after months of working under censorship. The restrictions had two aims: silencing news and commentary from the Government's foes; and instilling in reporters a gnawing apprehension that any one article, or paragraph, or even sentence could break a rule and invoke the wrath of the high priests of official silence. Yet my expulsion seemed not to result from any specific violation, but from a perception that - as the billboard and some officials in private moments put it - The New York Times is hostile toward the Government. As if to make the point, my designated successor has been barred from entering the country.

In my time in South Africa, I was arrested by white policemen, stoned by black protesters, yet welcomed into the homes of blacks and whites alike. In a mixed-race suburb of Cape Town, an angry crowd debated my execution in front of me before another man rescued me and gave me a gift - a cassette tape of jazz music he had recorded on his own hi-fi - so that, he said, my day would not seem all bad. A white Cabinet minister told me that I was doing the dirty work of the Communists, and a 15-year-old black protester told me that if I did not clench my fist and repeat a litany of revolution I would be burned to death - for my lack of commitment to a struggle that is not my own, except in the widest definitions of humanity and its hope of redemption. But that same young man became a friend, a guide through the maze of his peers' emotions, a protector of a man -a white man - old enough to be his father.

The incidents say only that South Africa deserves more than stereotypes, more, too, than the cynicism of its own or Western politicians; and that South Africa deserves a future to redeem a past so filled with passion it sometimes seems beyond absorption.

SOMETIMES, IN A REPORTER'S life, there is a sense of the miraculous: of arriving at a place just as that place itself arrives at a turning point in its history. In Lebanon in 1975, it was the sad beginning of a nation's self-destruction; in Zimbabwe in 1980, a nation's birth. In South Africa, it has been something more subtle, but no less historic.

Since 1983, something fundamental has changed: with protest and ostracism and divestment and killing, the Achilles' tendon of white rule has been laid bare. The process started with the Soweto uprising of 1976; the current violence is harsher, more intractable, a crystallization of discontent, a drawing of lines. But this is not, as some argue, because the Government's program of half-hearted and duplicitous reform somehow raised black expectations to a fever pitch. In fact, those changes, enshrined in a new Constitution approved by whites in November 1983, added up to a rejection of black rights. The passions behind the violence, orchestrated as some of it later came to be, fed not on raised expectations, but on the bitter knowledge that the boss had not changed at all.

The protests since September 1984 have not dented the armed might of the white state; hardly any of the 2,300 people slain since then have been white soldiers or white policemen. But the imagery of protest, both in South Africa and abroad, has produced far greater damage than rocks and gasoline bombs ever could: the collapse of the currency and the withdrawal of foreign credit; the sanctions and denunciations that rejected Pretoria's claim to membership in a community of nations depicted as civilized; the loss of technology caused by disinvestment; and the loss of expertise as more and more whites leave the country, unsure of where the Government is leading them, except toward disaster.

The protest - the blazing barricades and the rattle of gunfire, the cobalt-blue clouds of tear gas, the barbaric executions of blacks by blacks - had other effects, too.